'Babylonian Flats' in Victorian and Edwardian London

the london journal, Vol. 33 No. 3, November 2008, 233–247

‘Babylonian Flats’ in Victorian and Edwardian London Richard Dennis University College London, UK

The fi rst half of this paper examines the controversy associated with the building of Queen Anne’s Mansions, London’s fi rst high-rise fl ats, erected between 1873 and 1890, and a catalyst for the introduction of height restric- tions in the London Building Acts of 1890 and 1894. Subsequent sections consider the building’s place in the imagination of Londoners, the marketing of the mansions, which emphasised their height and novelty, and the characteristics of residents, especially as recorded in the 1901 census. The paper concludes by positioning Queen Anne’s Mansions in wider debates about living in fl ats and the acceptability of high-rise buildings in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London.

In Howards End (1910), E.M. Forster discusses the plight of the Schlegel sisters whose London town house is fi rst overshadowed by neighbouring ‘Wickham Mansions’ and then threatened with redevelopment to make way for ‘Babylonian fl ats’. Forster uses the term ‘Babylonian’ to signify not only the scale and spectacular form of luxury fl ats in Edwardian London but also the oppression and exploitation associated with processes of redevelopment, contrary to the interests of longstanding residents such as the Schlegels.1 Mansion fl ats appeared Babylonian in scale, but also ‘Babel-like’ in gathering hundreds of people of different ages, experiences and origins under one roof. This was particularly true of tall blocks of fl ats that could also be compared physically to the biblical Tower of Babel. Most mansion fl ats in Victorian London were fi ve or six storeys in height and formed semi-continuous street frontages — for example, along Victoria Street — but one building stood out as a ‘tower’ rather than a ‘block’: Queen Anne’s Mansions. The planning controversies surrounding its construction and subsequent extension, the ways in which it was marketed and the character of its mobile, cosmopolitan population all have resonances with more recent debates about high-rise building and loft-living in contemporary London.

Planning perspectives The ﬁ rst stage of Queen Anne’s Mansions, a 10-storey, 116-feet high building, situated between Victoria Street and St James’s Park, dates from 1873–5 (Figure 1).

ﬁ gure 1 Map to show Queen Anne’s Mansions and nearby mansion ﬂ ats, c.1890

A second stage in 1877 climbed an additional storey to 130 feet and, in part, to 12 storeys, at least 141 feet, and a much larger extension, in 1888–90, reached 160 feet. The developer and initial owner, Henry Hankey, a merchant and City banker, was evidently expert in testing the borders of legality in his business operations. For example, in 1872 he had presented a petition designed to expedite the winding-up of the failed International Contract Company of which he had been a director, but in the course of the hearing it emerged that Hankey had himself purchased several of the outstanding claims on the company and stood to benefi t personally if the petition succeeded: he would pay £20,000 as debtor-director, but receive £35,000 as creditor.2 Initially, Hankey’s building encountered few problems. Under the 1855 Building Act, new buildings exceeding 100 feet in height required consent from the Metro- politan Board of Works (MBW), but this was purely a safety regulation: the Board had to be satisfi ed that the walls of tall buildings were suffi ciently thick to support their weight. Hankey’s earliest application to feature in the Board’s fi les was not made until November 1875, by which time the fi rst part of the building was almost fi nished; so it appears that Hankey did not seek (and receive) the Board’s approval until his building was already 100 feet high.3 Meanwhile, a building labourer was killed by falling timber while working the ‘perpetual lift’ during gale-force winds and an unfi nished observatory on the roof of Hankey’s own private residence adjacent to the fl ats was destroyed by fi re, events which foreshadowed fears about safety that concerned the mansions’ neighbours over subsequent decades.4 In February 1877, Hankey applied again to the MBW, seeking permission for a South Wing, extending along York Street (now Petty France). This block, too, must ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 235 have been well advanced by the time Hankey sought permission, for he had alluded to it in his original application fi fteen months earlier, arguing that the extension would provide ‘an additional exit in case of fi re’. The MBW Architect’s Offi ce was getting worried about such retrospective applications, writing to the Westminster District Surveyor to suggest that such questions should be resolved ‘before the walls are built’. Nevertheless, Hankey was granted permission to construct the wing, subject only to the works being executed to the District Surveyor’s satisfaction.5 Three months later, Hankey made yet another retrospective application, confessing that his building was even higher than intended and proposing to use concrete fi reproof doors instead of the ‘old fashioned double iron doors’ prescribed by the Building Act. Previously, Hankey had been his own architect, but to supervise the fl ats’ completion, he recruited John Whichcord, described by George Vulliamy, the MBW’s Superintending Architect, as ‘an architect of eminence and a District Surveyor’. Presumably on the grounds that Whichcord could be trusted, Vulliamy recommended approval of what would now be a 148-feet-high, 12-storey building. However, the Board was not so easily impressed and declined to grant approval, despite Hankey’s increasingly anxious pleas: that his building was now far stronger than necessary; and that he had acquired land around the mansions to ensure nobody could claim loss of light or air and so that surrounding streets could be widened.6 Fire was a constant source of anxiety, especially in the wake of dramatic confl a- grations in Thamesside warehouses — most famously, the Tooley Street fi re in 1861, but of more immediate relevance a fi re at Brook’s Wharf, Queenhithe, in June 1876, when it was apparent that ‘the fi re engines could only send the water up to the fi fth storey’ of a seven-storey building.7 Giving evidence to the Select Committee on the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in May 1877, the Brigade’s chief, Captain Shaw, agreed that his appliances would be unable to ‘throw a jet of water to the top of Queen Anne’s Mansions’ and that ‘that building would be entirely destroyed if it depended upon a jet being thrown from the ground level to the top storeys’.8 Vulliamy’s own evidence to the Select Committee confi rmed that none of Captain Shaw’s appliances would reach the 100-feet height to which buildings such as a new hotel on Northum- berland Avenue were currently being erected. In the case of public buildings, such as theatres and music-halls, he would certainly take Captain Shaw’s advice before grant- ing licences, yet he did not propose extending the powers of the MBW to require licensing of ‘private buildings’. And he was not pressed on whether blocks like Queen Anne’s Mansions should be treated as sets of ‘private’ dwellings or as ‘public’ buildings.9 Whichcord’s plans substituted additional brick-walled storeys in place of a mansard roof, perhaps anticipating the critique levelled by ‘M’ in Building News in August 1877. Among numerous criticisms of plans for the ‘Mansions in the Skies’, ‘M’ noted that:

If I wanted to build a three-story house, and should seek to erect from ground level a front thereto of wood covered with slate, just a shade out of the perpendicular so as to “cheat the devil,” I should be stopped and told the Act did not allow it. But if my proceedings are bad at ground level, would they be less so if these stories are lifted a hundred feet in the air, being called a roof? Are not, in the latter case, the conditions a thousand times worse?10 236 RICHARD DENNIS

Three times Hankey submitted his plans, and three times the MBW rejected them, encouraging Edward Drury, the District Surveyor, to issue no fewer than six summonses for violations of the Building Act. In a hearing in Westminster Magis- trates’ Court, Drury admitted that ‘the work was perfectly safe and strong, and there was no public inconvenience. There would be no complaint of the exclusion of light and air.’ However, the building had been raised at least 11 feet higher than agreed, so ‘one story must come off’. Moreover, passages, fl oors and staircases were not fi reproof, and openings in party walls would facilitate the spread of fi re. The magistrate, reluctant to order demolition, adjourned the case, and when proceedings resumed several weeks later, Drury withdrew his summons. Hankey assured every- body that he would abide by the safety regulations, and was allowed his extra 11 feet, effectively creating a 12-storey tower.11 The Builder described the mansions as ‘monster blocks of dwellings’ and ‘Babel- like structures’. To guard against fi re, rooftop tanks, New York-style, contained 40,000 gallons of water, fed by a six-inch main from the Chelsea Waterworks, so that ‘the entire building could be drowned . . . in a few minutes’, and suffi cient to power several hydraulic lifts and provide a high-pressure domestic supply. The Times noted that

Everything is on a gigantic scale. The elevation looks the most elevated thing in bricks and mortar since the Tower of Babel. ... Hydraulic lifts are kept at work all day and all night, and this makes the highest fl oors the most popular, even at the same rental — indeed, the latest application from a well-known banker was, ‘for a nineteenth fl oor, if you have got one.’12 A more serious clash with the Board of Works accompanied the massive extension of the mansions in 1888–89 when what had become the Queen Anne and Garden Mansions Company Limited13 planned to extend the building west about 172 feet along Petty France, then north for 200 feet towards St James’s Park, then back east for 172 feet, creating a central courtyard. The proposed height was 130 feet to the parapet, but about 160 feet to the top of the roof, 13 storeys in all. On the north (St James’s Park) side, where the buildings abutted the Guards’ Chapel of Wellington Barracks, the height would be only 112 feet to the top of the wall, two storeys less than the rest of the extension.14 On this occasion, another well-known architect, E.R. Robson, was employed,15 but since the extensions needed to match the original, there was little scope for Robson to design a less barrack-like structure. As in 1877, approval was required for the thickness of the walls above 100 feet in height, and also for external iron fi re escapes. But even before the MBW had received an application from the builders, Lucas Brothers, it was being petitioned on two fronts to withhold its permission. James Knowles, architect of the Grosvenor Hotel, next to Victoria Station, and Albert Mansions, fi ve-storey fl ats on Victoria Street, and editor of Nineteenth Century, lived in Queen Anne’s Lodge, next door to the mansions, and promptly wrote at length to the MBW, objecting on several counts. Firstly,

This vast mass or cliff . . . would totally shut out sun and air from my own house and from the whole south side of the Guards’ Chapel adjoining. It would convert York Street into a mere narrow cleft or gloomy chasm . . . ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 237

Secondly, noting that ‘The existing Queen Anne’s Mansions are a byeword for their monstrous and overgrown ugliness’, he asserted that the extension would ‘constitute an eyesore so offensive as would disgrace the whole neighbourhood of Westminster, overshadowing all its splendid and historic buildings, and turn this quarter of London into a laughing stock’. Thirdly, he contemplated

the awfulness of the fate of hundreds who might be caught by a confl agration in such a totally inacceptible [sic] tower of Babel as is now proposed, to say nothing of the serious risks to the whole neighbourhood which such a Babel, if on fi re, would produce.16 Objections were also received from the Secretary of State for War, concerning loss of light to the barracks’ chapel, which had been ‘sumptuously decorated internally with mosaics, bas-reliefs, carving, and memorial windows’ and partook the character of an art gallery as much as a place of worship.17 The Board of Works decided that procrastination was the best policy. Thomas Blashill, the Board’s new superintending architect, recommended that Lucas Brothers’ application be referred to the Building Act Committee, which in turn sought the views of the First Commissioner of Works (responsible for the royal parks). Meanwhile, the War Offi ce negotiated an agreement with the developers, to the effect that ‘no portion of the proposed building shall rise above a plane starting from the ground line of the south wall of the Garrison chapel, Wellington Barracks, at an angle of 45° with the horizon’. But when revised plans were submitted in October 1888, they appeared ‘identical in every respect with that previously objected to’. At the same time, Lucas Brothers were demanding to know why the MBW had not yet approved the thickness of walls which they had already started building. In January 1889, the MBW at last informed them that under the 1855 Act, the building was an irregular one, and the District Surveyor would take proceedings against them, and in February, by which time the buildings had reached 29 feet above street level, the Board offi cially declined to approve the plans.18 By now, both Knowles and the War Offi ce had taken out writs against the developers and builders.19 The provisional outcome was reported at length in both The Builder and The Times:

An injunction has been granted against the company which desired to extend the vast pile of buildings called Queen Anne’s Mansions. It is not possible now to compass the removal of three or four storeys from that huge eyesore; but we may at least be grateful that the Court of Chancery has stepped in to prevent its spreading westward.20 The Times was mainly concerned with aesthetics:

We are entirely in favour of high and stately buildings in a great city, if they are not too high and if the site favours them. But a set of ‘Mansions’ which emulate the Pyramids or the Eiffel Tower, which dwarfs all the neighbouring houses, and which consists merely of an infi nite series of low fl oors and small windows, one above another, is an eyesore and a scandal. It is bad enough when the houses, without being too high in themselves, are too high for the width of the street, as is the case in Northumberland-avenue and Victoria-street.... But when it comes to a building so extravagant as Queen Anne’s Mansions, the site hardly matters; the edifi ce itself passes the lawful limits of ugliness.21 238 RICHARD DENNIS

The judge concluded by suggesting experimentation leading to compromise. He ‘advised that a temporary structure should be put up so that the effect upon the lighting of the chapel could be made the subject of actual observation’. The Times warned that:

If the builders make haste, they will get their temporary wall ready in May or June, the lightest time of the year. The other side should make allowance for this, and remember that a building which permits a picture to be fairly seen in midsummer may very likely make it invisible in November.22 In practice, the builders did make haste, but with all-too-permanent brick walls. The War Ofﬁ ce reached agreement with the developers in August 1889, by which time the buildings were approaching 100 feet in height. Wanting to avoid a repeat of the MBW’s 1878 retreat, the Superintending Architect of what was now the London County Council instructed the District Surveyor to take out a summons ‘as soon as an offence had been committed’.23 But when the summons was heard on 31 October 1889, the case was dismissed and costs (ﬁ ve guineas) awarded to the builders against the LCC. The most intriguing outcome of the whole affair was the advice of the LCC Solicitor. In his opinion:

the Magistrate in deciding that the building was lawful without the sanction of the Council came to an erroneous conclusion in point of law but I do not advise an appeal because the Council now contemplates applying to Parliament to obtain jurisdiction over the height of buildings and it will be very desirable to be able to quote [this] decision that the Council have no jurisdiction at present.24 Instead of fi ghting the case, the LCC applied in 1890 for new legislation restricting the height of new buildings to 90 feet (apart from two additional storeys allowed in roof space); and this was further reduced to 80 feet (plus attic storeys) in 1894.25 Queen Anne’s Mansions was a price worth paying to guarantee the passage of the 1890 Act. In the Council’s view, the mansions were still believed to be illegal, but it was easier to introduce a new law than to prove the validity and effi cacy of the existing one; and the easiest way to get a new law was to accept that the existing law was inadequate. The failure of Knowles’ private legal actions should not diminish our admiration for his mastery of publicity. When he launched his campaign in July 1888, he wrote additionally to the First Commissioner of Works, addressing him as ‘My Dear Plunket’, not only suggesting the parliamentary question he might like to receive on the subject, but also seeking advice on who might appropriately ask the question, and even providing the Commissioner with a model answer. He wrote in similarly familiar terms to the editors of Daily News, The Times and The Morning Post, yet again describing the building as ‘so intolerable and deformed a tower of Babel’.26 Nor did opposition subside once the building was a fait accompli. The new Build- ing Acts ensured its lasting uniqueness as a 12-storey ‘skyscraper’ and guaranteed it continuing attention by architectural journalists and commentators. Lecturing on ‘The Place of Music in Education’, Dr Arthur Somervell found time for an aside to note ‘upon one of the most beautiful building sites in the world, the erection of a gigantic slum dwelling for the rich’. Lord Curzon, speaking in January 1913 on the ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 239 aims of the newly formed ‘London Society’ for ‘the beautifi cation of London’ found it ‘almost incredible that a horrible phantasmagoria like Queen Anne’s-mansions should ever have been allowed to rear its head’. After the war, Sidney Colvin wrote condemning plans for a massive war memorial at Hyde Park Corner, labelling it ‘a barbarism not less to be deplored, though committed with a nobler purpose, than that which in the last century allowed the gross mass of Queen Anne’s-mansions at Westminster to dwarf the whole group not only of private, but of sacred and public edifi ces in its neighbourhood’.27 However, Delissa Joseph, an architect responsible for several blocks of 6- to 7-storey mansion fl ats, urged a revision of the 1894 Act, ‘to allow buildings of, say, 150 to 200 feet in height to be erected in suitable open situations’, such as overlooking Hyde Park or along the Embankment. He had little doubt that ‘had Queen Anne’s-mansions received an equally effective architectural cloak’ as Hyde Park Court (another building that attracted controversy during its construction between 1888 and 1891), ‘the feeling against it would not have run so high’. A Times editorial offered support, noting how ‘the paltry twelve or thirteen storeys of Queen Anne’s-mansions are dwarfed into insignifi cance’ by New York skyscrapers acknowledged to have ‘a real beauty as well as a practical use of their own’. There was nothing about sheer height that was ‘inherently ugly’. It would be far worse ‘if the upper ten storeys of Queen Anne’s-mansions were to be taken down and spread over St James’s Park, to house the same number of inhabitants as they house at present’.28

High ﬁ nance Financing the mansions proved a recurrent problem, initially blamed on delays in completion caused by the disputes with the MBW. Early in 1878, when interest payments and the costs of providing luxury services far outstripped revenue from an, as yet, only partially functioning building, Hankey attempted to make over the building to a limited company. The Times reported that the buildings had been valued at £258,244 but their net value, once mortgages and unpaid interest were taken into consideration, was only £66,000, less than the aggregate of Hankey’s other debts. When the general public failed to subscribe more than £10,000, a company was instead constituted by the creditors in partnership with Hankey, presumably because this was the only way in which they might ever get their money back.29 In 1890, the Queen Anne and Garden Mansions Limited (and, more critically, their mortgagees) leased the building to William Robert Renshaw, proprietor of Phoenix Engineering Works in Stoke-on-Trent, and two years later, the company was wound up, while a separate company was formed to provide heating, electric lighting, power and water to the mansions (and its neighbours).30 In 1896, the mansions were sold for £439,165 to a new company — The Queen Anne Residential Mansions and Hotel Company Limited — which retained ownership until the 1940s.31 The new name indicated the increasing use of the building as a hotel as much as an apartment house, a fate shared with other early blocks that lacked kitchens attached to each apartment, including St Ermin’s Mansions (1887), now St Ermin’s Hotel, adjacent to St James’s Park Station, and, most famously, New York’s Chelsea Apartments (1883), now the Chelsea Hotel. 240 RICHARD DENNIS

Marketing the mansions Queen Anne’s Mansions was marketed more as a social experiment than as innovative architecture. An essayist in Saturday Review confessed that ‘the outside of the building is not particularly attractive. It looks like a spinning mill, and from its extreme height has an unpleasant appearance of instability’, a view dismissed by Hankey as ‘written by a lady’!32 A report in The Times in May 1876 acknowledged that ‘the building has few architectural pretensions, but suggests comfortable rooms in great abundance’ and went on to describe the regime in detail, concluding that ‘It is all very novel and, socially speaking, revolutionary’, by which was signifi ed the idea of co-operative living, the absence of private kitchens and the provision of servants and communal dining and recreation facilities.33 So well-known was the building that, in 1877, the promoter of a stillborn ‘Kensington Gore Mansions Company’ marketed his speculation in terms of ‘the public convenience of mansions on the Hankey system’,34 as did the ‘Albert-Hall Mansions Company’, established in 1878 to develop the same site, immediately east of the Albert Hall, with ‘mansions on the Flat System, which has been so successfully carried out by Mr Hankey at Queen Anne’s-gate’.35 When a farce entitled ‘Flats, in Four Stories’ opened at the Criterion Theatre in July 1881, a reviewer noted that it dealt with ‘the conditions of life in those many-peopled abodes known as Queen Anne’s Mansions or as Cornwall Residences’.36 Through the early 1900s, a succession of innovative advertisements played especially on the buildings’ extreme height. Working within the existing limits of newspaper typography, a vertical advertisement was created in which each fl oor recorded the building’s best features while the walls comprised repeated courses of the same messages: hotel and residential fl ats, furnished suites, unfurnished suites. Improvements in printing permitted more sophisticated versions of this page-high, multi-storey advert in 1906: 11 fl oors of reasons to live in what was, mostly, an 11-storey building (Figure 2). Even its owners admitted that ‘Queen Anne’s Mansions is an ugly building externally’ and their most elaborate advertisement, in 1905, passing itself off as an informative article about problems of modern living, referred to ‘Hankey’s Folly’ as if it was a completely different building from their own!37 Despite (perhaps because of) their ugliness, the mansions attracted representations in fi ne art. The American artist, Joseph Pennell, managed ‘a fi ne bold drawing of one of the most inexcusable buildings in modern London’ among his illustrations for Henry James’ English Hours (1905) (Figure 3);38 and Malcolm Drummond, a member of the Camden Town School, painted a fashionable scene viewing the mansions from St James’s Park with a suitably up-to-date automobile passing in the foreground, an association of fl ats with modernity frequently used by commercial artists promoting luxury fl ats.39 Apart from the extensive range of amenities — a ‘grand coffee room; a club tariff, house dinners, breakfasts, and luncheons . . . hot and cold water laid on at all hours, speaking-tubes, immediate attention to wants, perfect facilities for communication, telegraphing, the despatch of letters’ in 1876; complemented by billiard room, smoking room, box offi ce, newspapers, doctor, chemist, laundry, and telephones in every room by the early 1900s — the obvious attractions of the building were its location and its height.40 For ‘Bachelors of means’, Queen Anne’s Mansions was ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 241

ﬁ gure 2 Advertisement for Queen Anne’s Mansions, The Times, 22 Sep 1906, 6 242 RICHARD DENNIS

ﬁ gure 3 Joseph Pennell, ‘Queen Anne’s Mansions’, c.1904, originally in Henry James, English Hours (1905), reprinted in J.C. Squire (ed.), A London Reverie (1928)

‘not 10 minutes from all the clubs, combining the advantages of a private house, the freedom of an hotel, and the luxury of a club’. For visitors to London, ‘It is close to Piccadilly, Bond Street, and the West-End Theatres; also to the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the new Roman Catholic Cathedral’, and less than 15 minutes from the City by underground train.41 In these respects, the mansions matched New York apartment-hotels like the Ansonia which also offered a combination of private apartments, full service and a relatively central location.42 The Builder acknowledged ‘the fi ne panoramic view’, extending from Crystal Palace and the Surrey hills in the south to Highgate and Hampstead in the north. Saturday Review qualifi ed this: ‘The three top fl ats are delightful on a fi ne day. Those who inhabit them will have a magnifi cent and ever-changing view when the Westminster fogs will allow them to see anything at all.’ A generation later, when ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 243

London fogs were supposedly less intense, Flats praised both the view — seeing the city ‘spread out like a huge map’ — and the quality of air ‘above the smoke limit and clear of the many fogs with which the city is troubled’: it was ‘as fresh, as pure, and as sweet, as that on the downs of Brighton, or the cliffs of Scarborough’.43 Yet for all these paeans of praise, no photographs of the view seem to have survived in public archives. Despite the lifts, the view barely compensated for the anxieties of height. Rents were the same on all fl oors; the pricing of ‘suites’ (comprising two rooms and a bath- room but no kitchen) varied only with the size of rooms — £120 per annum for suites with the largest rooms, £60 for those with the smallest, plus 20 per cent to cover taxes, and £1 per week for servants provided by the management.44 Even allowing for the modest size of suites, these rents were not excessive. Average rents for fl ats on nearby Victoria Street — not all with lifts, without the view, and almost certainly more traffi c noise — were about £30 per room per annum in the 1890s, and luxury fl ats with views over Hyde Park commanded rents of £750 per annum for a fourth-fl oor, four-bedroom fl at with ‘superb views’ and £850 for a top (fi fth) fl oor, fi ve-bedroom fl at with ‘unsurpassed views’. In most blocks, where the only view was of the building opposite, rentals decreased with height (above the fi rst fl oor, which was more expensive than street-level). Flats reckoned that where no passenger lift was provided, each fl oor above the fi rst was valued at approximately 10 per cent less than the fl oor immediately below; but in practice, even where there were lifts, rents decreased with height.45 Unfortunately, newspaper advertisements for Queen Anne’s Mansions rarely specifi ed rents, perhaps refl ecting the fl exibility with which rooms could be combined according to tenants’ wishes, another consequence of which was that no lists of tenants — in censuses, ratebooks, electoral rolls or directories — assigned them to numbered fl ats within the building, making it impossible to reconstruct precisely who opted for a room with a view.

Who lived in Queen Anne’s Mansions?46 On Census Day, 1901, a total of 132 private households included 237 residents supported by 30 domestic servants living within their households. Nearly half of all households comprised only one person; and most occupied suites of two or three rooms. Several households were ‘headed’ by wives or daughters, implying male heads away on business on census night; conversely, while many one-person households comprised bachelors, spinsters and widow(er)s, several were married men, presumably using rooms in the mansions as pieds à terre while their families resided outside London. Surprisingly, given the general consensus that ﬂ ats were no place for small children, there were as many as 15 children aged 0–9 (though this was a tiny propor- tion compared to the numbers living in 5- or 6-storey model dwellings, for example, in nearby Peabody Buildings). Few households retained their own personal servants because the management employed an army of servants resident in the buildings: the 1901 census identiﬁ ed 78 male servants, including 37 waiters, 11 pages, 8 porters, 5 lift operators and 4 window cleaners; and 98 female servants, nearly all described as simply ‘housemaid’. There were other servants who did not live on site. Flats in 1907 recorded 98 male staff who slept in the building, but another 82 who did not. 244 RICHARD DENNIS

Members of Parliament may have disapproved of the mansions in debates in the chamber, but this did not stop them from enjoying its amenities. Directories listed 16 MPs as residents in 1895, but only four in 1910 and two in 1914. The ratebook compiled in April 1901 recorded permanent residents in alphabetical order, including seven MPs, a countess, fi ve ‘Sirs’, one ‘Lady’, one bishop, two other reverends, a general, two majors, three colonels and a lieutenant. There was also a constant procession of visiting dignitaries, including senior diplomats and embassy staff whose arrivals and departures were regularly announced in The Times, some of whom used the building as a fi rst stop en route to more permanent quarters.47 Yet there remained substantial numbers of long-term tenants. Census returns are not very useful here, since so many ‘permanent’ residents came and went on business or holiday and had other homes outside London. They could not be guaranteed to be present on successive Census Days. But, starting with a list of those present on Census Day, 1901, some of whom will have been hotel guests, 14 per cent of ‘heads’ in 1901 had been listed in the directory for 1895, while 20 per cent were still present in the directory for 1910. These persistence rates are no lower than fi gures calculated in the same way, and for similar periods of time, but centred on the 1891 census, for residents of two Marylebone blocks of fl ats — the decidedly lower middle- class Cornwall Residences and the nouveau-riche Oxford & Cambridge Mansions.48 Making a direct comparison between directories for 1895 and 1910, 19 out of 103 tenants were still present 15 years later (three in the person of their widow), although only eight were also listed in the 1901 census, thereby confi rming the peripatetic character of the mansions’ ‘resident’ population. Over a shorter period, 1910–1914, the persistence rate was 59 per cent. Reverting to census data, the population’s origins were distinctive: 60 of 267 persons in private households had been born overseas (16 in Australia, 11 in India, 10 in North America) and another 11 in Ireland. Many more had experience of living in far-fl ung parts of the British Empire — as well as 10 army and navy offi cers, most now retired, there was an ‘exchange broker in India’ and a ‘Judge, Supreme Court, Australia’, both born in Liverpool, and a ‘Superintendent (Survey of India)’, born in Ireland. Among male servants, more than half were foreign-born, mostly in Germany and Austria (of 37 waiters, 36 were foreign-born); but female servants were nearly all British-born. Apart from the army and navy and the legal profession, male occupations embraced business (merchants, manufacturers and stockbrokers), professional engi- neers, architects and civil servants, a bishop, a sculptor and several journalists. The only women whose occupations were recorded (apart from servants) were spe- cialist teachers. There is little indication that Queen Anne’s Mansions offered a home for ‘new’ women. Indeed, one prominently self-employed woman resident through the 1890s was the anti-feminist writer, Eliza Lynn Linton.49 Mrs Linton had long been separated from her husband and, in this respect, typifi ed the wealthy but often fractured families whose divorces and bankruptcies featured prominently in The Times.

Conclusions The history of Queen Anne’s Mansions exemplifi es much of the history of fl at-living in London, but in exaggerated form. Flats and their inhabitants were regarded ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 245 sceptically and negatively by most Londoners.50 But only at Queen Anne’s Mansions and a few other relatively high blocks in Kensington and Knightsbridge was there the virulent opposition, often based on fear of depreciating property values, which typifi ed many North American cities.51 One critical difference was that most London- ers were tenants. If a skyscraper or a soapworks was proposed next door, the easiest solution was to move. In North America, outside Manhattan, owner-occupiers whose wealth resided in their property were quantitatively and politically more signifi cant, and more sensitive to neighbourhood change. Apart from articles specifi cally directed at reviewing the mansions, there was little mention of them in debates about living in fl ats running in architectural journals in the late 1870s and 1880s.52 Evidently, Queen Anne’s Mansions were a freak abhor- rence that did little to help the cause of middle-class fl at-living compared to the legion of fi ve- and six-storey blocks comprised of adjacent ‘houses’, each with its own staircase serving one fl at on each fl oor, which were less disruptive of established middle-class social and architectural values. Given how easily Hankey and his succes- sor company managed to ride roughshod over rudimentary building regulations then in force, it may seem surprising how few high fl ats were built in 1880s London. But the fi nances of large-scale buildings were rarely straightforward: two other relatively high-rise residential developments — Hyde Park Court (between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park) and Whitehall Court (overlooking the Thames) were both entangled in fraudulent activities associated with Jabez Balfour and the collapse of the Liberator Building Society.53 Queen Anne’s Mansions survived as an architectural dinosaur, taken over by the Admiralty in 1940 and eventually replaced by another ‘monstrous’ building, Basil Spence’s Home Offi ce, in the 1970s. During the 1920s, it was, however, joined and even dwarfed by another proto-skyscraper, the London Transport headquarters across the street at 55 Broadway.54 Its sophisticated step-backs and external sculp- tures only served to emphasise the crude utilitarianism of the mansions’ plain brick exterior. Had they displayed a fraction of the architectural quality of 55 Broadway, London’s high-rise history might have developed differently in the early twentieth century.

Notes

1 E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910, 1989), 117. 8 Ibid. 2 The Times, 12 Mar 1872, 11. 9 Ibid. 214. 3 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA): MBW/ 10 Building News, 3 Aug 1877, copy in MBW/ BA/23744; MBW Minutes of Proceedings, 26 Nov BA/24348. 1875. 11 The Times, 10 Jan 1878, 12; 31 Jan 1878, 12; and 4 The Times, 8 Oct 1875, 7; 14 Oct 1875, 9; 11 Nov Briefs for the Complainant in Drury v. Hankey, 1875, 5. in MBW/BA/23744. There are some intriguing 5 LMA: MBW/BA/24348; MBW Minutes of personal issues lurking beneath the surface in this Proceedings, 9 Mar 1877. case. The magistrate, E.H. Woolrych, had been 6 LMA: MBW/BA/23744, 24348. 7 For reports of the Brook’s Wharf ﬁ re, see The Times, Clerk and then Legal Adviser to the MBW, 1855–61; 16 Jun 1876, 5; 17 Jun 1876, 12. The quotation is Whichcord was elected president of the RIBA in from Select Committee on Constitution, Efﬁ ciency, 1879, in which capacity he attacked the misdeeds of Emoluments and Finances of Metropolitan Fire architect-members of the MBW, one of whom was Brigade, Minutes of Evidence, 1877 (342), 375. F.H. Fowler who twice seconded motions refusing 246 RICHARD DENNIS

to approve Hankey’s and Whichcord’s plans and 32 ‘Living on Flats’, Saturday Review, 23 Oct 1875, who, a decade later, was one of the principal targets 515–6, reprinted in abridged form in The Times, 26 of the Royal Commission investigating corruption Oct 1875, 3; for Hankey’s comments, see MBW/ in the MBW. See D. Owen, The Government of BA/23744. Victorian London 1855–1889 (Cambridge, Mass., 33 The Times, 20 May 1876, 12. 1982). 34 Ibid. 2 Jul 1877, 12. By ‘the Hankey system’ was 12 The Builder, 2 Jun 1877, 556; 18 Feb 1888, 128; The clearly meant not the style of architecture or the Times, 20 May 1876, 12. On lifts, see R. Turvey, height of the building, but ‘the purpose of alleviat- ‘London Lifts and Hydraulic Power’, Transactions ing the troubles of ordinary housekeeping’ and ‘the of the Newcomen Society, 65, (1993–4), 149–64. advantages of co-operative housekeeping’. 13 So called because another building on the site, 35 Ibid. 26 Mar 1878, 13. The company’s prospectus Garden Mansions, ‘a chateau pavilion with a tall promised ‘a restaurant (to which no strangers will polygonal tower sprouting out of it’, was to be be admitted other than the friends or guests of a demolished to make way for the extension. See tenant), thereby relieving the tenants from one of N. Taylor, ‘Unheavenly Mansions’, Architectural the greatest difﬁ culties attending housekeeping in Review, 139, (1966), 310–12. the present day, and combining the advantages of a 14 LMA: MBW/BA/38442. private dwelling with those of a hotel’. For further 15 The Builder, 18 Feb 1888, 128. details of Albert Hall Mansions, see Survey of 16 Letter from Knowles to MBW, 21 Jun 1888, copies London Volume XXXVIII The Museums Area of in MBW/BA/38442 and in J.T. Knowles, Letter South Kensington and Westminster (1975), 342–5. Book, Ref. 716/120, City of Westminster Archives 36 The Academy, 30 Jul 1881, 97. The play, adapted by Centre. See also P. Metcalf, ‘At Home in Westmin- George Sims from a French farce, was advertised in ster’, Architectural Review, 155, (1974), 135–8; The Times throughout July, August and September, idem, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and culminating in a performance at Bertram and Architect (Oxford, 1980). Roberts’s Great Annual Day and Night Fete at the 17 LMA: MBW/BA/38442; The Builder, 27 Apr 1889, Crystal Palace on 4 Oct. Cornwall Residences was 314; N. Wilkinson, The Guards’ Chapel, 1838–1938 a slightly older (1872–5), undistinguished terrace of (1938). middle-class ﬂ ats backing onto Baker Street Station: 18 LMA: MBW/BA/38442; MBW Minutes of see R. Dennis, ‘Buildings, Residences, and Man- Proceedings, 22 Feb 1889. sions: George Gissing’s “Prejudice Against Flats”’, 19 The Times, 15 Dec 1888, 16; 4 Mar 1889, 3; 11 Mar in J. Spiers (ed.), Gissing and the City (Basingstoke, 1889, 3. 2006), 41–62. 20 Ibid. 18 Apr 1889, 9. 37 The Times, 17 Jan 1903, 9; 27 Jan 1906, 4; 22 Sep 21 Ibid. 1906, 6; 5 Apr 1905, 11. 22 Ibid. For the full judgment, see The Times, 18 April 38 Subsequently reprinted in J.C. Squire (ed.), A 1889, 13. London Reverie (1928), Plate XXVIII, from which 23 LMA: MBW/BA/38442. the quotation is taken. 24 Ibid. Emphasis added. 39 Reproduced in Burlington Magazine, Oct 1979, 25 C.C. Knowles and P.H. Pitt, The History of 672. Building Regulations in London, 1189–1972 (1972). 40 The Times, 20 May 1876, 12; 5 Apr 1905, 11; 26 J.T. Knowles, Letter Book, Ref. 716/120. The Times ‘Illustrated Review of Queen Anne’s Mansions, and Hansard record questions asked by Shaw Lefe- S.W.’, Flats, (Jan 1907), viii–xi. vre of Plunket (on 3 Jul 1888) and of the Secretary 41 The Times, 27 Oct 1879, 14; 27 Jan 1906, 4. of State for War (on 27 Nov 1888). 42 E.C. Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New 27 The Times, 10 Jan 1912, 4; 14 Jan 1913, 9; 16 Jul York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca, 1990). 1920, 8. 43 The Builder, 2 Jun 1877, 556; ‘Living on Flats’, 515; 28 Ibid. 10 Jan 1920, 6; 24 Jan 1920, 13. ‘Illustrated review’. On theorising the view from 29 Ibid. 3 May 1878, 6; 4 May 1878, 8; 7 May 1878, 7. above, see M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday See also Building News, 29 Mar 1878, 333. Life (Berkeley, 1984); L. Nead, Victorian Babylon 30 The Times, 27 Jun 1891, 13; 29 Jun 1891, 14; 16 Dec (New Haven, 2000). 1892, 3; 10 Jul 1893, 3; 18 Jul 1893, 13; 27 Sep 1893, 44 The Times, 20 May 1876, 12. 4. 45 Figures derived from advertisements in Flatland, 31 Taylor, ‘Unheavenly Mansions’. Apr 1894, and Flats, various issues 1897–1921. ‘BABYLONIAN FLATS’ IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON 247

46 This section based on analysis of 1901 and 1891 cen- 51 For other examples, see Survey of London Volume sus returns, ratebooks and Post Ofﬁ ce Directories, XLV Knightsbridge (2000), 42, 54–8, and Volume all in City of Westminster Archives Centre. XLII Southern Kensington (1986), 69–70, 104. 47 See, among many examples, The Times, 3 May For North America, see K. Baar, ‘The National 1910, 13; 1 Mar 1911, 11; 22 Apr 1908, 8. Movement to Halt the Spread of Multifamily Hous- 48 Note that directories were compiled in the year pre- ing, 1890–1926’, Journal of the American Planning ceding publication, so the periods being compared Association, 58(1), (1992), 39–48. here are 1894–1901 and 1901–1909. Comparative 52 For references to this literature, see Tarn, ‘French ﬁ gures are discussed in more detail in R. Dennis, Flats’; D.J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: Cities in Modernity: Representations and Pro- London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, 1986); S. ductions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 Marcus, Apartment Stories (Berkeley, 1999). (Cambridge, 2008), 252–3. 53 G. Stamp and C. Avery, Victorian Buildings of 49 The Times, 16 Jul 1898, 12. London 1837–1887 (1980), 146–8; D. McKie, Jabez: 50 J.N. Tarn, ‘French Flats for the English in The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue (2004), 105–7. Nineteenth-century London’, in A. Sutcliffe (ed.), 54 S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, Buildings of England, Multi-Storey Living (1974), 19–40. London 6: Westminster (2003).

Notes on Contributor Richard Dennis is Reader in Geography at University College London (UCL), where he convenes the MSc in Modernity, Space and Place. His most recent book is Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), discussing London, New York and Toronto as ‘modern cities’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He has also written recently on ‘Common Lodgings and Furnished Rooms: Housing in 1880s Whitechapel’, in Alex Werner (ed.), Jack the Ripper and the East End (Chatto & Windus, 2008). His current research focuses on mansion ﬂ ats, model dwellings and apartments in London and Toronto, and on space and place in the novels of George Gissing.